


A Phoenix Unchained

by Liara_90



Category: RWBY
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Child Abuse, Coming of Age, Gen, Grimms Fairy Tales Kind of Childhood, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Light Angst, Non-Graphic Violence, Not Grimdark, One Shot, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, Unreliable Narrator, Well it WAS canon compliant, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 09:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12909504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liara_90/pseuds/Liara_90
Summary: The story of how Vernal came to be, as told by the Spring Maiden herself.Best efforts to be canon-compliant as of V5E6.





	A Phoenix Unchained

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a mix of my favorite backstory fics, namely _[The Limits of the Page](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5084050)_ by [CourierNinetyTwo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5084050) (for Cinder Fall, which nails the _Grimms' Fairy Tales_ feeling _perfectly_ ) and [mantisbelle's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mantisbelle/pseuds/mantisbelle) character studies for [WTCH](http://rwby.wikia.com/wiki/Salem's_Faction): _[Ecdysis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9835664)_ (Tyrian Callows), _[Summer's End](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10776855) _ (Hazel) and _[Spark](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10060115)_ (Watts)

* * *

Imagine that you’re nine years old, that it’s the middle of the night, and that you’re trying to figure out if you can hang yourself without waking anyone up. Can you creep downstairs to the kitchen, scrounge some rope out of the cupboards, and slip your head through a slip knot?

Spoiler alert: _I don’t._

Yeah, those years were pretty fucked up. Like those fairy tales that are actually horrifying in the original versions. How’d I even know that hanging was a thing? Well, same way I learned everything: _firsthand experience_. Woke up one morning wondering why my father’s door was still closed. I guess papa didn’t want me walking in on him while he was twitching in the air. That was a learning experience, alright. Also how I knew you were supposed to leave a note.

And _that’s_ what really got me in trouble.

I’d written it three nights before, my suicide note, scrawled it on a piece of paper I kept hidden in a book. I don’t remember what it said. Probably something stupid, barely-literate. But I was clutching that note in my hand when a voice shouted at me from behind.

“What in _hell_ are you doing at this hour?” yelled my uncle. (He was actually like a fourth-cousin twice removed, or something, but I always called him that.) He’d never wanted me around, but I was an orphan - dad dead, mom missing - and he’d drawn the communal short straw. “You sneakin’ food?”

I shook my head, eyes wide, terrified little girl that I was. That was a _really_ serious thing to be accusing me of. We didn’t technically _ration_ our food but it was pretty well-controlled. ‘Aunt’ and ‘uncle’ kept the cupboards locked at night. They said it was to keep wild animals from stealing our food while we slept. Even then, I knew that was bullshit.

Looking back, maybe ‘ _wild animal_ ’ was just another pet name for me.

So I stammered some terrified apology to my uncle, all the while trying to hide the note behind my back. If you’ve ever seen a kid try to hide something, you can probably guess that that _also_ didn’t work. He spotted it, demanded it, ripped it from my hands when I didn’t give it. And then he squinted, trying to read my terrible handwriting without a light or his glasses.

I don’t know what the usual reaction to learning your kid’s suicidal is. Not an issue I see often. But I’m _guessing_ most parents handle it better than he did. Maybe even with _no_ violence at all.

(Rich coming from me, I know. Fuck off.)

You don’t need a blow-by-blow. But there were a _lot_ of blows. Supposedly there’s an art to disciplining your kids without causing lasting pain. _Uncle_ sure as hell didn’t know it. He just kind of slapped me around for a while, waking up half the village in the process. Nobody stopped him, though, that’s for sure.

He yelled a lot, too, but nothing meaningful. Just that kind of verbal diarrhea people in a frenzy spew. He liked the word _ingrate_ , I can remember that much. _Coward_ , too, and _cunt_. I don’t remember how long this went on. It _felt_ like forever, but I know better than most how your memories can lie to you. Might have only been a few minutes. Hitting and slapping, throwing me into walls and tables and doors.

To this day, I don’t really know what set him off. His brother had killed himself, same way as I’d wanted to. Maybe he thought this was _tough love_ , that he was beating the suicidal thoughts out of me. Maybe it was just an excuse taking his anger out on me. Maybe he really _was_ just pissed at how ungrateful I seemed for being alive.

I didn’t really give him the chance to explain himself.

You know how they always say: ‘ _and in that moment,_ everything _changed for Dear Suzie_ ’, or whatever? Well, yeah, it was basically that. One moment I was getting the shit kicked out of me by some balding relation of mine. The next time his hand slapped me, it might as well have been hitting concrete.

I guess my Aura unlocked in that moment. For a lot of people, that’s the most important change in their life, like going through all of puberty in a few seconds, coming out someone completely different. For me, that was like an _afterthought_ to everything else that was changing.

My uncle looked confused for a second, like the universe had just glitched, cheating him of his hit. He tried again, yelling, except when I hid my head in my arms it _actually fucking worked_. Something in his hand _cracked_ as he tried to crack my skull.

He looked confused, so I took a chance. I tried to slip past him. I tried to _push_ past him.

Turns out lil’ Vern could suddenly push a _lot_ harder than before.

In my head, he goes sailing twenty feet back, like some cartoon. It’s a dumb memory, but I was a kid. It’s not how it happened, obviously. Our little cottage didn’t even have twenty open feet in a straight line. My uncle just kind of fell over, grunting in pain as his face suddenly slammed into the floor. 

He started bleeding from his nose. That’s the last thing I really remember from that night. After that it gets…

... _stormy_.

It’s taken me years to figure out what happened. Working backwards, now, trying to piece together random memories. Raven’s the only soul I’ve told _everything_ to, and she’s given me some insight, some clarity from an outside perspective. But it wasn’t like she saw what happened next.

I’d say I’ll spare you the boring details, but as per above, there aren’t many of them. Someone screaming. My cousins dragging me from the house. A big gathering in what I think was the village temple. People turning into monsters.

They decided to kill me, I figured that out. Same reason I think papa killed himself after mother left. Towns like that one can’t really maintain a militia. Too unimportant for the Kingdom to defend, too impoverished to hire a Huntsmen. Which means pretty much the only way to keep the Grimm away is by making sure nobody _feels_ too negative.

It’s why papa offed himself, yeah, I’m pretty sure. Not because _he_ couldn’t live with himself, but because his _neighbors_ couldn’t. It’s a funny thing about living outside the cities - there’s no stigma to suicide. It’s all-but-encouraged, honestly, if you’re going to be blasting a signal to the Grimm with your depression.

And if you’re not willing to end it _yourself_ , well…

Normally the punishment for most crimes was _exile_. It was the death sentence in all but name, but we pretended otherwise. Easier for everyone involved, those polite little lies. Except you can’t really make a nine-year old girl take the long road out of town.

I recognized my executioner. He was a butcher, literally. I have no idea how they decided it was his job to kill me. Probably figured he could do it cleanest. Just one more piece of meat sliced up for the village, right? He had a dirty cloth and a carving knife, in that shack behind his shop. A dead girl’s a lot like his sausages - nobody wants to see how they’re made.

I killed him, too. It was my Maiden powers, I know now, but back then it was like I just _thought_ him dead. A couple of villagers heard the commotion, and then they also died. I sound kinda blasé about it now, but back then it was fucking _terrifying_. People were angry at me, I got scared, and then bolts of lightning started raining down all around me.

And in the end, the villagers were right. I _did_ attract the Grimm.

My village was torn apart that night. Figuratively, literally. From the inside and the out (figuratively, literally, again). The Grimm were beating down our village’s shitty barricades while everyone tried to deal with the demon-child in their midst. Fear, panic, the usual negative emotions.

One of the Grimm - this tiny Beowolf, really - pinned me down, tried to eat me. I remember it exploding around me as I _tried_ to kill it. That was the first time I really _wanted_ something dead, consciously, and it happened. Just _focus_ a bit an _poof_ … no more Grimm.

Using my powers became a lot easier after that.

Like I said, I don’t remember a lot of what happened that night. But there was a big lightning storm that lasted for _hours_. And when I woke up the next morning, from some soggy spot of grass, the Grimm were all gone. So were the villagers. So was the village.

* * *

An airship came by and took me to the capital. Most of what happened after was a blur, but you’re not missing anything interesting. Trips to hospitals, a few temporary homes, shaking the Mayor’s hand (for some reason). Turns out I’d become a bit of a media sensation - the only girl who survived when her village was overrun by Grimm. Everyone loves those stories, they take the edge off a tragedy.

Nobody really asked _how_ I survived, but that was just as well.

I used to wonder how Ozpin and his minions found me. Looking back, it was probably no harder than reading a newspaper. You’ve got a village destroyed by Grimm, a single young girl who miraculously survived, and freak storms centered _right_ on said village.

Not to mention: he had the benefit of knowing what’d happened to my mother that night.

* * *

They sent me to Sanctum, which was as good a home as any, and most-importantly just a short stroll from Haven. Lionheart was supposed to be my guardian, though I figured out pretty quickly that it was Ozpin pulling the strings. But back then he was just a weird guy with a cane and a thing for _green_.

I made my first proper weapon at Sanctum, the first tool fitted for my hand. I called her Rhaidd. It’s not the same as the one at my hip now, but the design hasn’t changed all that much. A bit bigger, a bit deadlier. So pretty much me.

I was a smart kid. Not exactly a keener, just naturally gifted. The kind of raw talent that doesn’t make you a lot of friends with people who have to struggle for everything. Classes were fine - I learned my Dust Theory and the approved histories - but it was those after-hour sessions with Leo that were the best.

He was a coward, I figured that out fast, and that made him incredibly responsive to my questions. Because he was scared of me, even when I was, like, twelve. Even then, he had to know that if anyone set me off I could call down the worst storm Mistral’s ever seen. That I was only going to get _deadlier_. That I’d remember him when I grew up.

In most of our sessions - held in his office at Haven, me sitting in front of his desk with my hands in my lap - he just parroted whatever Ozpin had told him to tell me. Honor, nobility, respect, sanctity of life. The word _sacrifice_ got bantered around a lot, which after a while started to make my skin crawl.

I don’t want to say I _manipulated_ Leo into pulling back the curtain, even if that’s what I did. Because in the end, it was just me asking questions. And him being afraid of denying me. Of _annoying_ me. So he told me about the Wizard and the Maidens, about the relics and the vaults, about the undying evil that was trying to destroy Remnant. About magic. Sometimes he remembered to make it sound like fairy tales, but most of the time he didn’t.

I remember I showed him one of my outlines, once, this sketch of a tattoo. I don’t know why I showed him - I still must have cared about what grown-ups thought - but he began stammering immediately. About how I should wait until I’ve _matured_ before I made such a _permanent_ change to my body.

And then he went back to lecturing me about what the fucking Spring Maiden would give her life for.

I met Ozpin, face-to-face, exactly once in my life. Raven’s right - that was _more_ than enough. We’d chatted once or twice, over Lionheart’s Scroll, but never anything substantial. He must have been a busy man, keeping track of all his secrets and schemes. I guess he figured out that Lionheart had let the cat out of the bag, and needed to step in personally.

He was waiting for me in my dorm room, standing above my desk, leafing through the papers on it. That embarrassed me. I didn’t keep a diary, or anything, but they were still _private things_. Doodles of my classmates, sketches of dreams. Randoms words strung into poems.

“ _Miss Vernal_...”

I sat on my bunk, he took the chair by my desk, his cane planted between his feet, fingers strumming its head.

If you’ve ever been subjected to one of Ozpin’s little chats, then you know exactly what he sounds like. Soft-spoken, calm, reasonable. _Affable_. He’ll treat you well, respectfully. But so did the butcher back in my village. And in the end, all either of them cared about was what they were going to do with the meat in their hands.

He said that he could tell me about my mother. Why she’d always been different. Why she’d had to leave our village, our family. How she’d died. How he knew she’d been thinking of me, in her final moments. What she had done for the world. What _I_ could do, if I joined him. 

So I asked Ozpin if that’s what my mother would have wanted.

For someone who’s been around as long as Oz has, the old guy never learned how to lie.

In my head, it’s that lie that pushes me over. A neat, watershed moment in my life. But it wasn’t as quick, as clean. I took another month or two, letting the dark thoughts fester in my head. To recognize that I needed nothing they had. To realize that _sacrifice_ without _choice_ is an oxymoron.

To admit to myself that, ‘ _hey, none of these Maidens you keep hearing about seemed to die of natural causes, and you’re probably not going to be the exception_ ’.

Lionheart caught me on the way out of Mistral, nothing but a backpack and a few lien to my name. I want to say _he tried to stop me_ , but he didn’t. Just spewed those same hollow words. Trying to convince me to consent to the theft of my life. He was trying to convince himself as much as me. And then he ran off to place a call to Vale.

Like I said, he didn’t try to stop me.

Most stories of kids running away make it romantic. Not ‘ _candlelight dinner’_ romantic, but still stylish, gussied up. An _adventure_. They join the circus, or become witches, or get adopted by pirates. Cliché B.S. Nobody wants to read stories about the kids who freeze to death in back alleys, though.

I picked a new name, at first, traveling from town to town. It wasn’t like I had a destination in mind, some end goal. I lived about as recklessly as you’d expect from a thirteen-year old girl with a bullet-proof Aura and on-delivery lightning bolts.

It’s weird that, in my head, running away from Ozpin and Lionheart and all their little toadies feels like almost an afterthought, a side-story. Because the same month I ran away, I cut my hair, and I got a tattoo, and those two seemed a _lot_ more important to me at the time.

Women in my village didn’t really go for short hair. It wasn’t like a _law_ or anything, but you know how those customs are. Might as well have been. My hair was basically at my hips when I left Sanctum. And after a few weeks on the road, well, you can imagine what it was like. I took a pair of sheers and hacked it off, in the bathroom in the back of a bus. I started getting a lot more nervous looks after that, like I was looking for trouble.

So the look stuck.

The second change was the tattoo. That stuck even better.

I sketched it out over a week or two, but I feel like it’s been in my head for _ever_. Things I’ve always liked, things about _growth_. Flowers in bloom, the waxing Moon. And, yeah, the phoenix. I know they’re not real but I’ve always loved them. Felt a kind of connection to them, to those birds of death and rebirth.

It wasn’t until long after the ink was in my skin that I wondered if the other Maidens ever felt that same way.

I spent the last of my lien on that ink, paid out to a Faunus who’d been expelled from the White Fang by old Ghira Belladonna. His name was Renard, and he was about as trustworthy as you’d expect of a guy who’d tattoo an unaccompanied minor. When he saw that I was out of cash, he made a proposition to me. Or rather, he _propositioned_ me. So I beat the shit out of him, took my lien back, and checked into a motel.

Say what you want about the Academies, they can teach a girl to throw a punch.

He tracked me down the next morning. I thought he was going to try to kill me, but he got over the beating pretty quickly. If anything, he was impressed. Figured I was a rogue Huntress, which was close enough, and that I wouldn’t mind making some lien for myself, which was spot-on.

So this old guy - he wasn’t actually that old, but he looked it - was your typical middle-management kind of thief. Renard was hardly a criminal mastermind, more lucky than good, but he knew people, and was smart enough to keep his head down. He was a tattooist-slash-pawn broker by profession, and supplemented his income with some B&E on the side. His MO was pretty much unchanging - he’d scout out some home, or a small business, and then pay a bunch of teens to rob it. He’d launder their thefts through his shop, and make a tidy profit with plausible deniability. Like I said, he wasn’t a criminal mastermind, but it paid the bills.

I took a job. And another. And another. Turns out I had quite the knack for it. His regular accomplices liked working with me. But Renard tried to shaft me one time, shortchange me on a jewelry box. We got into a fight, and I killed him. The boys dumped his body out where the Grimm would find it.

I guess he wasn’t that smart, in the end.

I’d killed my share of Grimm before, which probably made that last hurdle a little easier. Killing a man, consciously, _thinkingly_ , not in a blind passion but as a deliberate choice. A few second’s struggle and then my problem was gone. It probably should have been a life-changing moment for me, some moral horizon. I should have had nightmares about it, been _haunted_ by it. After all Lionheart had told me about the necessity of preserving life, to have just _snuffed_ one out over a few hundred lien.

What do you think it means that I slept fine that night?

So I took over Renard’s two-bit operation. Didn’t really get to enjoy it for long, though. The stealing was still fine, the management… less so. I’ve never really been a _people_ person, and at the end of the day, the crime biz is about who you know. And I just _didn’t_.

So I hit the road again. I stayed mostly in Anima, but I saw the whole world. The whole world saw me, too. I wasn’t great at _subtle_. A robbery in Menagerie, an assault in Atlas. Ended up having to spend more and more time in pitched tents between towns, in the dark forests where the police didn’t dare to look.

You’ve probably guessed that that’s how I found Raven.

She later told me how she’d been looking for me. Not, like, _hunting_ , more like being in the same kind of places I’d be. And I learned how Raven Branwen wasn’t the only one with an interest in my whereabouts.

Let’s just say I’m _really_ glad she found me first.

She offered me shelter, for a night, a warm bed and a hot meal. I’d been on the road for a few days then, hitching with whoever didn’t ask. I knew she’d want something in exchange, but I accepted.

Raven knew all about me. We had tea and dried fruit and lamb. The tea was somehow just like how my mother used to make it. Raven sat on a cushion on the floor, just the two of us in her tent, her Grimm mask set off to the side like a freaky chaperone on a bad date.

They were bandits, she freely admitted, the same group I’d heard of hitting overland trade caravans. Every so often a bounty would be placed on them, but the Huntsmen that tried to claim them would either come back empty-hand, or not at all. That made Raven rather attractive to a young woman on the run. She wasn’t apologetic when she described what this wandering tribe of hers did to survive. I probably should have been horrified, like a good girl.

But as Ozpin had told me, back when he’d still thought me _his_ : the world is full of sacrifices being made by some people for others. The only difference was that if I sided with Raven, I’d get to be the one _making_ the sacrifice instead of _being_ it.

So I said yes. I guess my ‘ _running away_ ’ story has a cliché ending after all.

It was the usual banditry for the next little while. It was neither as romantic or horrible as I’d thought it might be. We’d hold up some trucks, steal their cargo, then ransom it back at a reasonable price. Most of the big companies we stole from didn’t even mind that much, as long as no one got hurt. It was just another cost of doing business, a tax, a _fee_.

We moved every few days, deep in Grimm-infested territory that even Huntsmen thought twice before crossing. There’s a rhythm to the lifestyle, a harmony, even if it took me a bit to find it. The Branwen tribe is not exactly welcoming to outsiders - which I most _definitely_ was - but break a few bones and save a few lives, and respect will come grudgingly enough. Those were almost carefree days. I was sixteen, seventeen, and I had the run of the camp, the woods, the world. I got into fights, and won them. I hunted Grimm. I fucked a boy for the first time, then figured out why I didn’t like it. Raven never stopped me if I wanted to go into town, grab a hot shower and a new wardrobe. But I found I wanted to do that less and less. Not because I was scared of being ‘identified’ and ‘detained’, but because, _fuck_ , our camp was my home.

For the first time since I was five, I had a family. Not a biological one, not a normal one, but a group of people I shared my life intimately with. Can you imagine feeling that feeling for the first time?

Of course, things had to go to shit eventually. The honeymoon was fun while it lasted, but then, well…

A _lot_ of people died, all at once.

It was a raid like any other: low-purity Dust crystals moving from Point A to Point B. _Normally_ Dust is precious enough to fly by airship or mag-rail, but this was pretty low-grade crap, uneconomical to move except on the ground. We’d hit them a few times before, each time without so much as a warning shot. Except - gods know why - _this_ time they decided to hire some muscle to escort this not-at-all precious cargo. Retired Huntsmen - men in their fifties or sixties with fat bellies and their best years behind them - but still good enough with a gun to make some lien off-the-books.

Our men died first, having gotten complacent with easy jobs. Guns and swords flying at the little barricade we’d made for their trucks. And then Raven appeared right in the middle of things, cleaving limb from limb. She was _fast_ , she was _deadly_ , but there were a _lot_ of them. Not enough to stop us - that’s never been the problem - but enough for one of them to get a signal out, to call in airships and soldiers for support.

That night was the first time since I was nine that I really unleashed with everything I had. And _this_ time, I knew exactly what the fuck I was doing.

We killed something like two hundred men that night, soldiers dying for some cheap Dust and a misplaced sense of honor. We’d have kept killing, too, had Raven not been standing too close to one of the lorries when it blew. She was hurt - not critically but badly enough - so I slung her over my shoulder and _flew_.

I meant that kind of poetically, but it was also pretty literal.

I found a cave a few leagues from the battlefield, someplace deep and dry. Gave her some tea from my thermos, kept watch while her Aura repaired cuts and burns. We had a lot of time to talk. I guess Raven half-expected me to leave her, or finish her off, to claim the tribe as my own. Maybe I could have, but the thought just didn’t cross my mind. I’ve told her how I had no desire to be a leader. And when she figured out that I actually wanted what was best for the _tribe_ , not just _me_...

I want to say she told me everything, but that’s not true. I don’t think Raven’s capable of that kind of openness, not with anyone, not anymore. Can’t say that I blame her.

But let’s just say that if I hadn’t distrusted Ozpin _before_... 

I’d actually pieced a lot of it together myself, connecting the dots I’d collected from those months in Mistral. There was Salem, and the Grimm, and her crusade to extinguish the world. But then there was _Ozpin_ , as told not by the cowardly Lionheart but by the Raven Branwen who’d trusted him. Immortal, undying, unrelenting. Leaping from one body to the next, obliterating the mind of each successive host. And that was hardly the worst of his sins, his ‘ _mistakes_ ’:

STRQ, Amber, Ironwood, Geppetto, Rainart, the Academies, the Relics, the silver-eyed warriors… And _this_ was the man who thought himself worthy of leading humanity to salvation? What he’d done to the Branwens _alone_ voided any claims of humanity, to say nothing of his judgement.

Salem didn’t scare me. I’d accepted death a _long_ time ago, and her apocalypse is just dying writ large.

 _Ozpin_ , though? What do you think _he’ll_ do to for the sake of his last stand? And let me remind you that there are a _lot_ of things worse than death. Just ask whoever was born into that body Ozpin struts around in.

 _But I digress_.

We made it back to the campsite without incident. That was the same night Beacon fell, if you’re wondering. It was also our first snowfall of the year, the little flakes melting on my ams. I put a kettle over an open fire when we returned, for tea.

Raven gave the order to move camp. A great many Grimm were coming towards the cities that night, and like _hell_ were we going to get in their way.

**Author's Note:**

> You know, I used to look scornfully at people who published fics in the middle of a season. Like, seriously, can't you wait a few episodes and see if canon is _remotely_ accommodating to your fics? Now I hurry to publish before next week's episode renders everything non-canonical.
> 
> As always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. If you didn't like something, please don't hesitate to tell me - it's seriously the only way I'm going to get better as a writer. I can also be reached on [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/pvoberstein/) or [Tumblr](http://www.pvoberstein.tumblr.com/).
> 
> I'm actually weirdly liking Vernal, but the dearth of canonical information has made sussing out her background a bit difficult. Most of what we know comes from a few stray lines from Lionheart in "[Welcome to Haven](http://rwby.wikia.com/wiki/Welcome_to_Haven)" - we know that Vernal seems to have been identified as the Spring Maiden by Ozpin's faction, begun training, and run away, over a decade ago. (" _She was determined, at first, when she inherited her powers, but the weight of responsibility proved to be too much for the child. She… ran. Abandoned her training, everyone. That was over a decade ago._ ") We also know that " _she was picked up by bandits, specifically the Branwen tribe_ ", so you have to keep an eye on the timeline for when Raven left STRQ/Taiyang/Ozpin. Getting Vernal's "voice" right is also pretty difficult, because while I could probably bit the entirety of her dialogue so far into a couple of Tweets, she's annoyingly complex.
> 
> While I probably got a lot wrong, this was a fun little writing project, and I hope someone out there enjoys it. Trying to keep the post-NaNo momentum, and all that. I promise to write something smutty with main characters one of these days.


End file.
